Interior design ideas and inspiration for creating a beautiful new home or breathing life back into your existing home.

Friday, 29 August 2014

Relishing updating a fireplace and putting off looking at TV storage!

As you know, our next project is the living room. Here's a quick shot of how it looked when we viewed the property. Each to their own...but not my taste. Very brown. The flooring change half way through the room marks the point where an extension was added and the owners decided to carpet the extension section. Anyway. Plenty of scope for improvement with lots of light from double doors and 2 additional windows and views over the garden. So far we removed all of the shelving and stripped and lined all the walls ready for painting. We've removed all of the plastic skirting and will be replacing with wood. Nothing fancy...just standard skirting. The wood floor we have in the kitchen (see previous posts) is being continued through into this room.

The fireplace is opposite the double doors and featured a dark wood reproduction fire surround (fire wood!), brown tiles and a gas fire (removed). The plan is to create a wider opening and install a wood burner....partly because we've had a few trees cut down and therefore have a plentiful supply of logs...and partly because we love the heat generated by wood burners. The look will be plain and simple.

The table on view is a relic of our previous cottage existence and is waiting to go to new owner. The tool kit belongs to the 5 year old who intends on helping with the tile and hearth removal apparently...

The internal doors to study and hall will also be changed at some point...but that will have to wait for now. As with other rooms, in the short term, we have, at least, updated the door handles to a more contemporary style. Small changes at a time are sometimes necessary.﻿

I've yet to decide on a scheme for this room but I've been trawling the mags and looking at so many houses...checking Pinterest and generally having a good nosey whenever I'm out!

Below are a couple of the rooms I like and from which I am thinking of taking my inspiration. This to me, is quite a grown up look, but I'll only be stealing elements. Splashes of vibrant colour play a part, of course. I quite like the burst of pink from the coffee table but I'm not sure how that will go down with the boys in the house...

The plan so far is to paint the fireplace wall (the full width of the room) in an off black colour. Quite dramatic...and very dark....but as the room is spacious and gets a fair amount of natural light, I think it can take it. The remaining walls will be white. I considered a paper for the wall rather than paint, but my problem with paper is I tend to fall head over heals for a paper and love it for a while but then grow increasingly tired when I spot something else or feel the need to paint over it. My husband pointed out, quite rightly, it just becomes expensive lining paper! Experience has taught me that paper is not the way to go for me on this occasion.

Working with a dark colour relies on finding colours via accessories/artwork to provide, literally, some light to counteract the depth. At the same time, with a dark colour only on one wall, the white walls will need some contrast in order to balance the room and not leave it looking like a game of two halves.

I was going to talk TV storage units (yuk!).....but I can't quite bring myself to broach the subject yet. This will be where I struggle massively but am not allowed to chuck out the TV! I'm hoping I will stumble across an inexpensive piece of interesting furniture that can double up as a TV stand/table.

We're also working on a small playroom just off the dining kitchen. So far, this has been lined and painted brilliant white. Again, this was a dark, brown nothing kind of room. As it's probably going to end up as the toy graveyard, we are keeping it predominantly white and have purchased some retro comic posters just to add a bit of interest and colour. These were sale purchases from online supplier www.allposters.co.uk

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About Lottie's Interiors

I live in the Midlands with my husband and two young children. Over the past 10 years I have been lucky enough to be able to indulge my passion for interiors having furnished, decorated and renovated 5 properties including our current home, an early 19th century cottage. I am an avid, bordering on obsessive, reader of interiors magazines and whilst they provided me with the inspiration for this blog they are also the reason it has taken a while to come to fruition. Whilst magazines are a great source of inspiration and ideas they all too often feature high end style and design for those lucky enough to have celebrity or city exec bank balances and the homes to match! I hope to inspire and encourage those of you who, like me, perhaps don't have unlimited budgets and vast city pads or country piles but who want to create beautiful homes nonetheless. Along the way I'll share with you my own decorating projects...the triumphs and undoubtedly the disasters but most of all I hope I give you the ideas and encouragement to pick up your paintbrush and give it a go!